Deep Impact/Headscratchers

• Astronomer Wolf must have known it was at least two years until impact. Why was he in such a dang hurry to get the news out?
  • Two years is no time to prepare for an impact of that magnitude.
    • A valid point, but that still doesn't excuse his speeding down the road and the fiery crash he ended up in. Even one day's delay wouldn't have made much difference.
  • He'd just discovered something that would be ground-breaking in both senses of the word, and he was panicking.
    • He couldn't have called somebody, anybody?
      • Panicking is, by definition, not acting rationally. Saying "Well okay, he was panicking, but why didn't he do something more rational?" is sort of like saying "Okay, I get that water is wet, but why aren't you dry after getting rained on?"

• There HAD to be a better-qualified bunch of astronauts to be sent to the comet, what with the entire pool of humanity to choose from.
  • It makes no sense to send a man on what could unquestionably be a suicide mission when his wife is very pregnant
    • What about sending a man on a suicide mission that will save the lives of his wife and unborn child?
  • None of them seem to grasp how dangerous the mission they are on is, nor that the loss of one member is acceptable when the existence of Earth is on the line.
    • Astronauts are trained to within an inch of their lives to meet dangerous situations while avoiding panic-just listen to the tapes of Apollo 13 after the explosion. And the loss of one member is acceptable, but it's a bit much to expect them to not even consider rescuing a crewmate they had known and trained with for months if not years.
  • They're obviously grumpy that the old, experienced guy is coming along with them. How very professional.
    • People have emotions that aren't always logical? How unlike real life.

• When Leo gets to the house to ask Sarah to marry him, her father is obviously already concerned about home security. The neighborhood is already heading downhill - the area is a mess, and he's chaining up his motorcycle plus affixing bars to the windows. Where is his daughter? Out on her own, unsupervised, far away from the house! Nice to see he has his priorities straight.

• Why are there helicopters hovering over the traffic jam in the establishing shot? It's a few hours until impact! They can't be news choppers - there shouldn't be anyone home to broadcast to! What news organization has a staff that dedicated and wouldn't want to be home with their family?
  • "Nyah-nyah! We're in helicopters and you're stuck on the highway!"
  • What, people in California wouldn't be interested in the plight of the inhabitants on the East Coast? What about the rest of the world? There are tons of people to broadcast to! New York isn't the center of the world, y'know.
  • There would definitely still be people trying to report on the end of the world even as it happened, either through a sense of journalistic integrity ("I'm a reporter, this is what I do, I'm going to do it even at the end of the world") or irrational and borderline hysterical continuation of vulture-like behavior ("HA HA IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD I CAN'T BELIEVE THOSE OTHER LOSERS AREN'T COVERING THIS THE DEATH TOLLS ARE GONNA MAKE FOR GREAT DRAMA!").

• Why is everyone waiting until the last moment to evacuate? They had hours warning to evacuate the eastern seaboard.
  • Well, it's not like there was anywhere to go. Most of them were probably planning to shelter in place until they found out that they would be sheltering under 2,000 feet of water. And they did have hours' worth of warning to evacuate the Eastern Seaboard... is that anywhere close to the time needed to evacuate 40-100 million people? Nope. But they should have known the final trajectory of Biederman for days before impact, so the real question is, why didn't evacuations begin long, long beforehand?
  • How long do you think an evacuation takes?

• Why are almost all of the families of the astronauts available to say their goodbyes? Wouldn't you think that having your husband or wife on a mission that has the potential to save the planet would mean a guaranteed spot in the underground bunker? With hours until impact, wouldn't they already be in there?
  • The blind astronaut's wife is being flown in from Utah to get on the video feed. Uh... he's blind. Couldn't they have just had her radio in?
  • They didn't know how long his flash-blindness was going to last when they sent for her, and nobody wanted to tell her he'd been blinded and never saw his son.

• The tsunami rushing over the land behind Leo and Sarah should have had a massive wavefront, black from the detritus of the entire East Coast. Instead it's a neat, clean wave - even miles inland.
  • When has a megatsunami ever been realistically portrayed? People expect a wave to look like your average surfing wave in Hawaii no matter how much debris it's accumulated. Same goes for its behavior-people just don't understand that every cubic meter of water weighs a ton, and no human structure ever built could survive being swamped by one. If it had been portrayed "realistically", every building in New York would have been swept off its foundations (not just the skyscrapers between Front Street and the East River) and it would have been pushing the air in front of it out of the way at the same speed it was advancing, so people would have blown off their feet long before it got anywhere near them.
    • But, of course, if the movie were 100% realistic, there wouldn't be a megatsunami, because they don't propagate across oceans the way regular tsunamis do-impact events and enormous landslides cause enormous local waves, but they're a different wave type than regular tsunamis, and their height rapidly diminishes the further you get from the source. One possible source of a megatsunami is the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands-it was the subject of press hysteria that predicted that it would generate a megatsunami 650 meters high that would travel across the Atlantic and devastate the Eastern Seaboard. In reality, the Canary Islands would be devastated by this high wave, but by the time the waves made their way to the US, they would be 1-3 meters high, if you're lucky. So, in the movie where Biederman hits off Cape Hattaras, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland would bear the brunt of the devastation (with waves between 50-600 meters), the rest of the Eastern Seaboard would be affected by waves resembling the height of the Boxing Day tsunami (waves between 5-30 meters), and the rest of the Atlantic Ocean shoreline would get off virtually scot-free.